Gareth Southgate has been forced to carry out a plate-spinning act but the seven-strong contingent will strengthen his handTyrone Mings’s forearm smash on the Austria striker Sasa Kalajdzic. Jordan Henderson’s taking of a penalty away from the centre-forward Dominic Calvert-Lewin against Romania, and missing it. Any number of defensive slips, individually or collectively.The thought has occurred all too frequently during England’s Euro 2020 warm-up games: thank goodness it was not the finals. Can you imagine if these kind of errors, some rooted in the all-consuming desire to impress, in players essentially losing their composure, had happened, say, against Croatia in the opening group game on Sunday? Related: Harry Kane feels England in ‘better place’ than at 2018 World Cup Related:...
This shameful and hurtful act in response to taking the knee before the game only adds to the fraught buildup to Euro 2020Romania’s players agreed to take the knee for the first time at the Riverside Stadium as a gesture of solidarity with their English hosts. As loud, angry boos rang out around the ground the Romanians must have wondered what they’d stumbled into here. What kind of weird, contorted, backwards kind of country is this England anyway? Didn’t they used to be someone? Welcome to England 2021. Divided, belligerent, set against itself – and reduced now by the formalities of a football match to debating the idea of “Englishness” until it falls apart at the seams. Related: Ernesto Valverde:...
A talented squad’s involvement could end before a euphoric momentum to match 1996 and 2018 has a chance to buildInternational tournaments are only tangentially about the football – which is probably just as well given how unsophisticated it often is beside the very best of the club game, how sluggish it can appear. They are about the stories and the mood, about the scandal and the drama and, most of all, the sense of shared experience.Russia 2018 was a very good World Cup and an enjoyable tournament to cover, but watching England’s victory over Colombia alone in a drab flat in Samara, surrounded by another journalist’s drying laundry, and seeing the scenes of jubilation from back home, there was a...
Swapping young Dortmund midfielder for the very different Jordan Henderson would bring a vector of risk the England manager must carefully weigh upWhenever England exit a major competition, you often find newspapers and websites – just for a bit of fun – trying to guess what the next tournament squad might look like. Leafing back through the predictions from three years ago, offers a pretty decent snapshot of which players were expected to kick on: those whose ascent was foreseen and those who came largely out of nowhere.Most correspondents correctly expected England’s Euro 2020 squad to be based around the core who went to Russia. The near‑unanimous inclusion of Dele Alli is an indication of just how far his stock...
A handful of the best emerging talents to seek out as they look to make waves around Europe this summerThe latest talent to emerge from the famed “Bromma Boys” production line in Stockholm after Bojan Djordic and John Guidetti. Kulusevski has made steady progress in his first full season at Juventus and was the hero of their Coppa Italia victory over his former club Atalanta. Having moved to Italy three months after his 16th birthday, the forward spent two spells at Parma and joined Juve for more than £30m last year. Kulusevki, whose father is from North Macedonia, was born in Sweden but represented Macedonia at under 16 and 17 level before making the switch and is often compared to...